Download Volume 12 here

The Isle of Man. 177
ilefwit liiia at Mum Cniibli, or Maiugurvia in Strafehspcy, in the
year 1187. Donald was slain in the battle, but he left a Clan
Mac William to cai-ry on the fight. His son, Donald Ban, and
the descendants of Malcolm M'Heth, gave Alexander the Second
great trouble as late as 1216, and I am not sure that the circling
eddies of this long-continued Gaelio revolt against Anglo-Norman
laws, language, and institutions did not reach down to "Wallace
and Bruce, and helped largely to secure Scottish independence.
When I visited the island some years ago, I was told at Douglas
that INIanx Gaelic was rapidly dying out ; and would altogether
disappear as a living Linguage with the then generation. The
vicar of Kirk Braddan and a local Wesleyan preacher were the
only ministers who preached in Manx, at least in Douglas and its
neighboui'hood. The new school system had caused Manx to be
excluded from the public schools. Many of the young people
were seized with that snobbish spii-it which is so often found to
prevail in places largely depending on summer visitors, and disowned
knowledge of Manx, even when their bad English proved
it to be the only language which they thoroughly understcod. Yet
it was admitted that when the vicar of Kirk Braddan held Manx
services in Douglas—the most Anglicised |dace in the island
he had always crowded audiences. In truth his fidelity to his
native tongue, his personal character, and his Gaelic eloquence,
made him a " King of Men !" On looking a little under the surface
of things, I found that Manx, although veiled, was still strong
in Douglas, and that with the exception of a part of the Kamsay
district, which had been invaded toy farmers from the south of
Scotland, it romained everywhere the household language of the
Manx people—the language, too, in which love-songs were made,
and in which Manxmen, meeting in distant parts of the world,
conversed with one another. I therefore came to the conclusion,
that although practically banished from pulpit and school, Manx
Gaelic would live through the period of English summer visitings
as it had lived through three centuries of Scandinavian and
Danish rule. The Manx Society founded in 1858, by its many
valuable publications, has done, and is still doing, much to save
the Manx language from being obliterated, as the British tongue
of Cornwall was wiped out in last century, and the Gaelic of Galloway
was silently killed soon after George Buchanan, about 1580,
described it in his history as a living language.
The spelling of Manx Gaelic was always of the phonetic kind,
but it remained unfixed until the publication of the Manx Bible
in 1772. Here is the Ix^rd's Prayer, first in Manx, then in the
12
—